It's Time to Say Goodbye, America

America, we will soon say goodbye to something.

One way or another this year will end with a farewell.

It will either close with a glorious, triumphant blast of freedom—or with the sickening death knell of a once-great nation, gone for good.

Either America will part ways with the Republican candidate for president (and his sycophantic enablers and coconspirators) or we will part ways with democracy.

Those are the two choices here.

There is no third option.

This moment is about each of us choosing which of these two things we're committed to losing and which we want to keep.

It is about deciding whether we will fight for this person and his party or for the disparate, multitudinous We The People who have shaped and defined and co-created this nation for nearly two hundred and fifty years.

As a child, I grew up being taught that the beauty of America was found in the personal liberties it promised for every human being without condition or caveat, the strength of the system that protected those liberties, and the people of integrity placed in positions of power that defended us against attacks on those liberties, whether they came from within or without.

The very bedrock of who we have been and would be (I was told), was the power of the collective voice of the people to determine our destiny together: of our individual wills tethered together like a sail that would steer us where we dreamed of heading as a country.

I believed much that story and it was a story I largely had great confidence in—until fairly recently.

That story is now on the brink of becoming permanent fiction.

In these days, as you read or hear these words, our interdependent destinies are being written. I wonder if we are up to meeting the moment. I wonder what History will record about us. I wonder if we are prepared to do what is required to demand that our will be done.

The stakes simply could not be higher, and as a result we are being called upon to bring the best of ourselves to bear on these days: whatever convictions we hold, whatever faith we profess, whatever we treasure in the deepest recesses of our hearts need to be clear and apparent.

This has nothing to do with a politician or a political party—it is about guarding the elemental core of America, about making space for everyone.

If every vote does not count, if each voice no longer matters, if elections are now going to be academic, if our courts will forever be compromised we are no longer who the songs and anthems declare we are. We will cease to be the words chiseled into monuments announcing ourselves as a compassionate refuge for tired, huddled masses who long to deeply breathe in the winds of liberty. We are not a place worthy of the flag or the people who have defended it and died for it.

If we decide to yield the will of the American people to any person or any group of politicians (no matter who they are), we will have severed our last ties to everything that made us a brilliant beacon of light to this world.

We will have co-written the epitaph of this nation in this moment.

So, Americans: Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; people of deep faith and of no religious affiliation; people of every pigmentation, orientation, and kind; those of every corner of this country that has given them a home—we need to decide who or what we will say goodbye to this year.

We either say goodbye to him: a small, hateful, ugly man who is so far beneath the privilege of leading America or we say goodbye to America as we have known it.

Those are the options in front of us.

Our farewell in these days will define us forever.

I pray we're not ready to say goodbye to America just yet.

I think our best years can still be ahead of us—we just need to live long enough to see them.